As long as your copy of Office 2004 is up to date with the latest service packs, it should have support for syncing address & calendar data to .Mac/MobileMe, which of course Address Book and iCal can do as well. (I think this can be done whether or not you actually have a .Mac/MobileMe account, but it's been a while since I tried it; if you have to, you can always sign up for a trial account just to get this started.)

Once you have syncing enabled, you don't have to do anything at all for this to work. Your Address Book data ends up in Entourage, and vice versa. Likewise with iCal, if you want that one also.

There are other ways of doing this, such as what this hint describes, but they're all WAY more complicated, and lack the nice ability to keep the two of them in step going forward.

You obviously have had no experience with attempting to migrate Groups out of Entourage! It has to be one of the hardest things I've ever tried to help a client accomplish!!

There is no built-in way to do it, and there are several sites online that explain supposed workarounds. Micro$oft even has a page explaining how to do it, and it is a ROYAL pain. We decided it wasn't worth the trouble...

This method seems much more straightforward, believe it not, and I will definitely be trying it with a client next week. I'll post back with our results.

I'm a big fan of data portability for exactly this reason. There's big downsides in getting heavily invested in an app that doesn't let you carry around your data between programs, devices, etc. This sounds like a prime example.

If this really is easier than the usual approach, good luck with it. Isn't Entourage scriptable? Maybe there are ways to automate at least some of these steps, no?

Since Entourage does not export contacts in groups, it's especially important to add each group member to the Address Book. Assign a category to the contact like this: Group: Family. (by using Group as the first part of each group name, it makes it easy to sort and to list when addressing the group names.)

Now that you have all group members in your Address Book with a category, select to export under File as Entourage archive (.rge) file and select category (select the group name) from the popup. Now you have an .rge file with just that group.

Next step is to create a new Identity in Entourage. Don't bother to add account info. Just cancel that out. Import the .rge file into this new Identity. Now you can export the contacts as a tab delimited file.

Another option is to check out this script: Sync categories in Entourage with groups in Address Book: http://www.jonn8.com/html/SyncEntourageABGroups.html

If you have ever had to recovery group members after a crash, you'll be sorry if you didn't add them to the Address Book.

There is an AppleScript in your AppleScript folder in Applications that will import Entourage addresses and groups. The catch-22 is that Entourage will allow you to create an address in a group that is not also in the contacts list, whereas Address Book will not. So, any group where every address is also in the Entourage contacts list will import, but the others will fail.

This tip gives a very clear way of getting around this seemingly impossible to resolve issue.

I could not get the script to work using 10.8.2 Apple Mail with Entourage, so this hint was the only method that worked for me. Thank you for this. The instructions have changed slightly, so here is an update:

1. Create a temporary folder to use for the transition. I called mine contacts, and stored it on the Desktop.
2. Open Entourage's address book. Select all of the individual contacts except for the "me" contact.
3. Drag those contacts over to the temporary folder that you created. They will save as vCards.
4. Drag these vCards into Contacts.
5. After the cards are successfully imported, delete them from the Entourage address book (so you are left with only the groups and the "me" card).
6. Delete the vCards from the temporary folder -- don't delete the folder, just the vCards inside.
7. Go back to Entourage's address book and click on the group you would like to import. Select all of the contacts inside.
8. Control-click on the highlighted list and select Add to Address Book from the contextual menu. Those contacts now should populate the address book as individual entries.
9. Select those contacts (except the "me" contact), drag them to your temporary folder.
10. In Contacts, create a new group (Shift-Command-N), name it appropriately, then drag the vCards from your temporary folder directly onto the Group in Contacts.
11. If there are duplicate cards, they will be updated.
12. Delete the contacts from the temporary contacts folder, and from the Entourage address book, and repeat for each remaining group.

The only change I would make is to create two temporary folders, one for Contacts and one for Contact Groups. That way, you can keep all of the individual vCards that were originally in Entourage and import them back into Entourage when you are finished.